


without an end (neverland)

by soulofme



Series: sheith fairytale au's [4]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Peter Pan Fusion, Keith (Voltron) as Peter Pan, M/M, Pre-Relationship, Shiro (Voltron) as Captain Hook, no underage tho don't worry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-08
Updated: 2020-06-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:28:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24598279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soulofme/pseuds/soulofme
Summary: His name is Keith, and he’s a Lost Boy.
Relationships: Keith/Shiro (Voltron)
Series: sheith fairytale au's [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1145246
Comments: 2
Kudos: 42





	without an end (neverland)

The lost boy is named Keith.

His is young and agile, hardly a day over eighteen. He leads the rest of the children, fills their heads with dreams and stories of everlasting freedom. He’s different from them, different enough that Captain Shirogane wants to figure out what makes him tick.

He, unlike those he makes company of, has experienced pain. The ugliness of life hasn’t spared him, and sometimes Shiro wonders if that’s why he makes it his personal mission to protect all the children in his care. He's been aged, even if he's forever doomed to stay a young man. Something about him has aged him, dimmed the bright way he once held himself, as all kids do until a certain point.

But that's not all that Shiro notices about Keith. He’s firm and assertive, foul-mouthed when angry (even worse than that pixie he keeps around him, Pidge). Shiro knows he hates him with everything he has, and even so, his beauty is impossible to ignore.

They’ve been at this for years, this back and forth that cost Shiro his arm and Keith his innocence. Shiro does his best to give him a wide berth, pillaging the parts of Neverland that Keith can’t quite exert control over. Even so, he's sure to leave his mark. Just in case Keith were to somehow be near, he wants him to know that Shiro had conquered the land and all the riches that belong to it.

But somehow, even when he tries not to, he returns to find Keith. Over and over again, to the point where it feels like a bad habit. And Keith, intelligent and perceptive as he is, _notices_. It’s why he’s here today, barging into Shiro’s quarters like he owns them. How he managed to board the Atlas without his crew noticing, Shiro doesn’t know. Keith works in mysterious ways, it seems, and today is no exception.

He’d sat himself down in front of Shiro, looking pissed to hell, and Shiro had graciously stayed quiet. The minutes had ticked by, with Shiro occasionally checking his pocket watch, and when thirty of them had marched along, Keith had finally opened his mouth and spoken.

“Why won’t you leave Neverland?”

He’s blunt and to the point, not giving Shiro a moment to think. It’s genuine enough that he can’t imagine lying, though, but he’s still off-guard enough that nothing he says will be satisfying for either of them.

“Why would I?” he settles on eventually.

Keith scowls, but even then he’s still pretty. “You’ll die here.”

He spits the words out. How many times as he seen death? How many of his former friends had grown up and forgotten about him, living out their lives until their eventual demise? How many people has he lost, never to recover?

Shiro thinks it's better to not know.

“Will you miss me if I do?” The air between them feels heavy, charged with something he can’t quite put a name to.

Keith’s lip curls in contempt. It’s the way he usually looks at Shiro, but there’s something different about it now. For one, it doesn’t seem as cold as it usually does. He looks resigned, as if whatever transpires between them is exactly what he'd prepared himself for. It makes Shiro burn with curiosity.

“You’d be doing me a favor.”

Shiro leans forward across the old oak desk. It creaks threateningly under his weight, loud enough that he wonders if his crew up topside can hear it. Keith slouches in his seat, one eyebrow raised expectantly, arms crossed over his chest.

“Do you _want_ me to go?” Shiro asks, even though he has a general idea of the response he’ll get.

In the end, though, Keith surprises him. It’s what he’s good at. It’s why he’s been able to evade Shiro for so long, to lure him out only when he’s ready for a fight. He has an edge to him, something that Shiro can’t possibly match. It makes it difficult to not want to fight, to win and hold it over Keith’s head for _once_.

“No.”

He’s speaking low, hardly loud enough for Shiro to hear. But he _does_ hear, and it feels like the world around them has ceased to exist. The walls of his captain’s quarters feel like they’ve shrunk, closing in on him and trapping him between them. He can’t even hear the roar of the waves rocking against the ship, taking them farther and farther across the sea.

“Why?”

“I don’t hate you,” Keith says simply, and then he doesn’t speak again. Not when Shiro prods him, not even when he stares him down, repeating those four words over and over in his head.

Something inevitably changes between them, shifts into a direction that is new and unfamiliar in the worst kind of way. It makes Shiro’s stomach knot in ways it hasn’t since he was a boy, back before he’d belonged to the sea.

Keith, sitting rigid in his seat, looks embarrassed. There’s a flush to his cheeks that has nothing to do with his youth. He looks like he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t be. In this case, Shiro guesses it’s being civil to his proclaimed enemy.

If he really thinks about it, they were never really enemies to begin with. Not even when Keith had been the reason for Shiro losing his arm in a fight. Not even all those times when Keith lured his ship into a siren’s trap that harmed his men, killing the ones weak enough to fall prey to them.

Because somehow, in the strangest way, Shiro has been inevitably drawn to Keith. Maybe it’s because he likes chasing the pain, likes the way it reminds him he’s alive when he forgets. Maybe it’s because Keith shakes his world up, rearranging it in a whole new configuration that Shiro’s never seen before.

Whatever it is, whatever feeling keeps the two of them tied together, Shiro had long ago decided to hold onto for dear life. Keith is the reason he refuses to leave Neverland. There’s no other way to say it, and nothing else would be true anyway.

“Then I guess I’ll have to stay, right?”

Keith puts up a wall between them again, one that Shiro has no doubt he’ll knock down again.

“Don’t get in my way,” the lost boy warns, and before he can even blink, he’s up and gone.

Days march on, each no more important or memorable than the last. But on one particularly long one, when they’ve been sailing for an exorbitant amount of time, his crew snaps to attention.

“Captain! We’ve got eyes on the Lost Boy!”

And Shiro can see him, quite clearly, with the wide arcs he makes, drawing figure eights as he mocks them from the sky. He’s far away that Shiro can just barely make out the gold dust that clings to him like a second skin, leaving long trails behind him as he slices through the clouds.

“Leave him be,” he says, ignoring the murmurs that break out around him.

“Captain?”

“He won’t bother us anymore,” Shiro replies, turning to return to his quarters.

He slips away before the crew can ask him—or more accurately, _demand_ —if he’s lost his mind. When alone, he brings out the big bottle of whiskey, the one only touched on a bad day or a particularly good one. It's sour on his tongue, but burns in the best way as it slides down his throat. He thinks of Keith, suddenly and all at once, and the unnamed feeling begins to make much more sense.

When he sees Keith disappear into the sky, shining brighter than even the stars, he decides that today is unbelievably _good_.


End file.
